Burnt offerings

Tag Archives: lsd

We had arrived about two hours before midnight, and the party was in full swing. Our friends had procured among each of themselves a ration of fairly decent coke. The two of us had missed the boat on that front and were generally “eh” about coke, besides. Of course when the classified substances are on the table one hates to feel left out and, not being much for drinking, the two of us had raided the pantry for some kind of thrill to take with us.

What we remembered we had, nestled cryogenically in the icebox, were two fruit pastels, each individually wrapped in foil and secured in a small baggie, with both of them contained in a takeaway box. Each pastel had been injected with LSD.

We had had these for some time, and for all we knew they might have degraded somewhat and might only deliver a substandard trip. I was nevertheless apprehensive; I was a methodical psychonaut, and took my communion after days of prep, in a safe and controlled environment, with a free schedule and no potential for invasion. The reason acid goes wrong for some people, I would often say with an obnoxious arrogance, was because they were treating a therapeutic tool like a party drug.

So here I was, at a party, about to go against all my own sagely shamanic wisdom. I didn’t hesitate much, and once we’d both placed one in each of our mouths, the Fear seemed to hit her.
“Was this a good idea?” She asked me around her pastel with a nervous smile.
“Well we’ve done it now, so let’s ride it out.” I replied. It sounded warmer and more encouraging when I said it. It dawned on me at this point that the pastels were ‘double-doses.’ I didn’t relay this information.

We sat on the kitchen floor as the first waves began to settle in about 45 minutes later. A slight shift in equilibrium, like suddenly developing sealegs that are attuned to the psychic waves shifting forcefully in a crowded party. Keeping with the slightly nautical theme, the blue lino floor pattern began to swirl and breathe beneath us. We giggled down at it, occasionally noticing that people were looking down at us and talking among themselves, but already at that point of not caring.

The LSD experience is always poorly conveyed, visually. I can’t and won’t be so vulgar as to speak for anyone else’s experiences, but I don’t see anything resembling a Beatles movie when I trip (Alhamdulillah). The visuals, in the beginning, are all about fluctuations in light-sensitivity. “Flutter-vision”, I’ve always called it. Like a border of golden feathers batting around the edges of objects and people. Around the time you begin to notice visual effects, like “breathing” surfaces, shifting patterns, even geometric projections, you’ll also undergo a change in personality. I find that I become calmer, more full of wonder and giddiness. I’m confident speaking with people who are sober or otherwise not-tripping, sometimes moreso than I would be sober.

But a notable mental effect I’ve undergone, when tripping, is a ‘stepping-back’ of sorts. A tendency to observe your physical, mental and emotional movements and get some sense of how they’re all working in conjunction with each other. So when I’m staring at the beautiful floor, which now conveys all the movement and thrust of Hokusai’s Great Wave, any scoffing I hear directed at my behaviour is now analysed, determined to be based in the scoffer’s own insecurity, and gracefully discarded. In a sober mindset my natural tendency would have been to internalise the mockery and alter my behaviours to as to avoid further negative judgement. So you can appreciate how liberating such an experience is.

Meanwhile, our friends were into the coke now, and the two of us were dimly starting to become aware of the fact that no one else was on drugs at this party. How presumptuous of us, to bring a shitload of Class A’s to your doorstep. Oh Christ there’s a fucking BUFFET! Guys we really called it wrong.

But no one seemed to mind our hijinks, and by now the two of us were fascinatedly staring at our friends, who over the course of the evening would undergo a transformation, but more on that later.

Midnight was difficult. We were all situated on the first landing when the chant began.

“TEN”

A violent swell of energy from downstairs; I know my companion saw the red and purple flare of dark smoke rising from below before vanishing as well.

“New Years! The countdown! Come ON!” They yelled as they pulled at us while we desperately clung to the bannisters, not knowing what doom they were pulling us down to. We relented, and stalked down into red light and a booming chorus of time.

“SIX”

“FIVE”

It was very doomsday. Into the room we stepped, to be confronted with some kind of cruel visual trick. They had all crossed arms and were singing, their swaying, interlocked and inscrutable forms belching forth torn, unsynchronised and misremembered renditions of a song their grandfathers knew. We departed back the stairs and waited for our friends to return. In time they did, and they were not overly annoyed at us.

It was after this point that the transformation began. For whereas at the beginning of the night the bags had been full-to-brim with illicit powders, now things were running low. At the beginning of the evening the talk had been fast, complimentary, glamorous, confident and egotistical. People had flicked their hair, tittered, and bumped another key. This was youth. This was life.

But now eyes flicked about. Jaws worked invisible meals and sweat began to bead as knuckles flexed and teeth were ground. Inevitable talk of procuring more was soon quashed; not now, not ON New Years. They weren’t nearly in good enough stead with any of their People as to entertain illusions of priority on what must be the coke dealer’s best night of the year.

As we sat and stared on the stairs, nestled comfortably to the bosom of our own drug’s 12-hour duration period, we watched as our friends became beasts before us. Clicking their jaws, tearing at the grubby bags and tonguing out the very last few fragments. The impatience, the frustration, the angry grasp at the jouissance that had previously seemed so enduring.

Things fell apart gently after that. After a relocation to what turned out to be a much messier party, the two of us made our excuses and departed come about 5 or 6am, and cheerfully strolled home in the chill of a New Year’s dawn, our own intoxicant still at play and soon set to begin gradually diminishing, right around in time for a nap.

I was initiated into the magickal practice during a very long period of self-imposed exile, during which time I had come to lose faith in everything I had previously taken for granted. The hierophant who introduced me to this very different way of thinking was a young man named Tim, with whom I had very few interactions. The little time we did spend together was, however, rich with esotericism. Synchronicities were firing off left and right all around me at the time, and I can only think now that, if I do have a soul (and this is still very much up for debate), it was sending out a kind of psycho-spiritual distress signal in the hope of being rescued from an extremely depressing time in my life. Tim answered the call.

I should probably go ahead and mention: this isn’t a short story like previous entries, this all happened for really-reals.

Okay, some context: I dropped out of school when I was twelve. Had something akin to a breakdown following an assault and never quite recovered from it. I withdrew from the world, stopped going outside, stopped speaking to people, stopped opening the curtains. When I finally emerged and began talking to people again, they always asked the same question: was I American? This was due to me not having spoken to anyone in a very long time and spending a lot of time listening to podcasts from the States. This might sound a bit strange, but that’s what pretty much not leaving a room for eight years will do to you.
Hoping to gradually re-enter society, I applied to volunteer at a charity bookshop, and right around the time I started working there, so did Tim.

I don’t know where Tim came from, I don’t know where he went. All I know about him is that he’d read some pretty interesting literature and it had coloured his perceptions somewhat. We got to talking, and he revealed an interest in magick. Magic, I asked? Like, as in card tricks and tophats? Nono, that was ‘magic’. It was MAGICK Tim was into (don’t get too obsessed with the difference in spelling; it was mostly Crowley’s way of being all individual and shit). Tim told me that he’d read certain books, certain texts, and had practiced certain techniques described within, and horror of horrors: he’d gotten results from it. I was intrigued.

He put me onto certain books and comics, and then just as soon as I’d met him he was gone. He’d joked about putting his barista-CV into the letterbox of the local Freemason lodge, and I never heard from him again, Coincidence I know, but it’s an entertaining path of thought.

Reading these works, most of which had a ‘Chaos magick’ bent to them (more on that later), I realised something: I’d already done this stuff.

Side-story: When I was 16, I’d discovered weed. This isn’t easy to do when you don’t get out of the house, but somehow I’d finagled a way to procure it without having to know anybody. Problem was, it was freaking me out hard. I was getting seriously fucked-up visions from it, really dark paths of thinking, and I was just about ready to just pack it in when I had a weird thought: why not ask a God to help? Far as I could tell, there weren’t many Gods around who existed solely to defend the worshipper from throwing a whitey, so I figured I’d make one up. I spent two weeks designing this deity (bear with me, I was pretty messed up back then); I had an invocation, a prayer, a visualisation, and method of communion, the whole nine-yards. And as soon as I started saying a prayer to this Goddess I’d concocted… no more freak-outs. No more paranoia. Now maybe it was the deep breathing, maybe it was the meditation, maybe just maybe I actually caused a deity to come into being. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is this: I got the results I wanted. You can imagine how overjoyed I was when I realised years later, while reading about chaos-magick, that I’d been doing it all along.

I got into Tarot cards, sigil magick, even invoked Choronzon one time when I felt my life needed to change (and Christ did it…), and I loved every second of it. Alan Moore described it really well one time, he said that it’s important you understand that when someone who’s into magick talks about all this stuff, that they are at once deadly serious, and also talking about things happening exclusively in their heads. Your mind and perceptions are your own territory; do what you want with it. Magick, as I saw it, was just a way of tricking your brain into processing things differently, in a way that appeared to alter the exterior world. Whether it did or not wasn’t really important; it all came down to a kind of solipsist-satisfaction.

At this point my idea of “The World” was very malleable. I’d been cut off from it for the better part of a decade, and was now engaged in mental exercises that taught me not to put too much faith in any one perception-model. Due to all this, I think, I reacted VERY positively to hallucinogenic drugs. As I see it, chemicals like psilocybin and LSD take a wrecking-ball to the concrete structures we’ve built in our minds since childhood. This is why some people find it scary: it’s the ultimate in uncanny-horror, the realisation that the familiar is in fact very far from it, and that perhaps you’ve been wrong all along, perhaps everyone has. Never run from what you see on acid; acid didn’t put anything there, it just dredged up what was already buried deep in your unconscious. For me, the world hadn’t really solidified into that concrete form. I’d taken it apart piece-by-piece during my exile, and it was all newly-laid wet clay when I started engaging in magick and psychedelics. All the drugs did was teach me not to let it harden, to keep my mind open to all possible facets of perception. This may be why I’ve yet to have a bad trip after ‘dropping’ around 14 times.

Eventually I went to university, and I kind of strayed from the magickal path a bit. Studies took up most of my time, and what spare time I did have I mostly spent on baser concerns: videogames, getting high, and jacking off. I’ll admit to having used sigils a couple times for essays I was a little nervous about, and those times yielded very good grades, but for the most part I was letting that funny little magus in me atrophy.

Now, a year after graduating, I’m feeling it again. I don’t know how to describe it, but the cards feel alive in my hands again, the sigils glow in my mind’s eye once more, and though perhaps a healthier mind would be worried about once again engaging in what a friend once described as “recreational schizophrenia”, I couldn’t be happier.